Until it is proven that the supposedly tried-and-true bitcoin code can actually work and survive with only the absolute minimum changes needed to form a separate blockchain, sich as default port and connect handshake, proposing revolutionary changes, innovations, "advancements" seems possibly premature.

It actually is starting to look as if bitcoin itself is fundamentally flawed, since it is not itself at all immune to exactly the kinds of overly rich, even if on other people's resources, religious fanatics that societies that try to use currency in lieu of, and possibly even as an attempt to ameliorate or avoid, violence, warfare, dictatorship and so on, seem so good at aquiring as enemies. How hard would it be for any other Ayatollah to do to bitcoin what the bitcoin Ayatollah's are able to do even to chains that are pretty much identical do bitcoin itself?

-MarkM-

This is why we abandoned SC1 (mostly bitcoin code) and rewrote it to fix most of the glaring holes (SC2). You are right that Bitcoin is just as vulnerable, it's just a matter of scale. Luke-Jr and his cronies can take down small chains right now, guys with a few million can do it to Bitcoin if they wanted.

Until it is proven that the supposedly tried-and-true bitcoin code can actually work and survive with only the absolute minimum changes needed to form a separate blockchain, sich as default port and connect handshake, proposing revolutionary changes, innovations, "advancements" seems possibly premature.

It actually is starting to look as if bitcoin itself is fundamentally flawed, since it is not itself at all immune to exactly the kinds of overly rich, even if on other people's resources, religious fanatics that societies that try to use currency in lieu of, and possibly even as an attempt to ameliorate or avoid, violence, warfare, dictatorship and so on, seem so good at aquiring as enemies. How hard would it be for any other Ayatollah to do to bitcoin what the bitcoin Ayatollah's are able to do even to chains that are pretty much identical do bitcoin itself?

-MarkM-

This is why we abandoned SC1 (mostly bitcoin code) and rewrote it to fix most of the glaring holes (SC2). You are right that Bitcoin is just as vulnerable, it's just a matter of scale. Luke-Jr and his cronies can take down small chains right now, guys with a few million can do it to Bitcoin if they wanted.

SolidCoin is the only secure cryptocurrency available right now.

Coinhunter, advertising in the Bitcoin community has done little to help your cause. It is the divide between ideology that is killing Solidcoin now. Imagine advertising atheism in a church, or socialism in the US congress. Solidcoin would be done much good if instead you chose to listen and take the suggestions of Solidcoin community members, who have all pushed for more openness, to heart.

Whatever benifits Solidcoin offers are overshadowed by the problems with Solidcoin's internal community right now. Deal with civil unrest before invading other territories.

At a minimum, alt chains are a playground/proving ground for new features that may (or may not) be worthwhile for inclusion in Bitcoin proper. Regardless of any monetary value in those chains, they provide the community with the opportunity to experiment and try out new ideas. Attacking and destroying something just because you don't like it and you can is wrong.

DOS attacks are against the law (criminal and civil in the US). We can't sit around and let people get away with DOS'ing new chains just because they're new. I hope those responsible start getting prosecuted.

At a minimum, alt chains are a playground/proving ground for new features that may (or may not) be worthwhile for inclusion in Bitcoin proper. Regardless of any monetary value in those chains, they provide the community with the opportunity to experiment and try out new ideas. Attacking and destroying something just because you don't like it and you can is wrong.

DOS attacks are against the law (criminal and civil in the US). We can't sit around and let people get away with DOS'ing new chains just because they're new. I hope those responsible start getting prosecuted.

With enough complaints to Luke's ISP, I am sure something can be done......after all, just because his immediate connection wasn't responsible for teh attack, he used that connection to orchestrate a large scale attack using remote computers at his disposal.....like a BOTNET OP.

Well ain't that special so have you guys formed the committee yet to decide just what coins are allowed to exists so they don't taint the sainted holy bitcoins...

So? Fight back. Fix your technology. Raise enough BTC to pay two or three small bitcoin pools which are together larger than luke to incentivize them to merge mine this coin. Had this been done— hell— had this been announced in advance of going live, then it wouldn't have been vulnerable to this attack.

Altchains like this are vulnerable because they have no value, especially initially... Merged mining takes effort to set up— contribute to making it cheaper— otherwise only people who are looking to ponzi a new coin or are looking to burn it down have much incentive to join it. A little payment money for mining would go a long way to tiping the incentives towards cooperating rather than defecting against it.

If you're going to be an altchain you should innovate— not just copy bitcoin code. Here is a chance.

I'm laughing at CH's claims— as if SC weren't the most repeatedly exploited coin of them all. That it says around at all speaks to the amazing power of hope. Sadly, things don't seem to change.

I'm doing a full quote of gmaxwell's post to try to preserve it for posterity.

I like it the most where he came up with "tiping the incentives" as an euphemism for extortion.

Luke-Jr has a very stilted writing style. gmaxwell is a world-class copy-writer.

We used to joke about "mining cartel". But now we have "mining mafia" consolidating the control of their territory. Forget about doing a collection for Max Keiser to shoot a short about Bitcoin. We should do a round of fund-raising to induce F.F.Coppola to direct and produce a "Godminer" triptych.

But if we cannot even just get a dozen or few identical clones secured there's no point worrying about so called "innovation".

Maybe its just the age old war of neophobes versus neophiles being played out yet again?

-MarkM-

I bet we probably could get plenty of Bitcoin clones running like you describe. A good launch example was LiteCoin - despite similarity to Tenebrix, it wasn't successfully attacked because everyone had time to prepare ahead of time. If ALL the major Bitcoin pools had been configured to merge mine CoiledCoin, then a 51% attack would have been just as unlikely as it is with Bitcoin.

Another option that might help in the future would be to base off the current Bitcoin block chain at the time of launch instead of creating a new genesis block. That way, everyone who has invested in Bitcoin automatically has some CoiledCoins too, so they have less incentive to attack until after they exchange away their CoiledCoins. We would see less hostility towards alternate cryptocurrencies if they presented less of a long-term threat to the community's savings, and looked more like a fork than a pump-and-dump.

I don't particularly have any incentive to respond to the scammers that I foiled, given the significant cost (in time) to do so. Nor do I have any financial loss or care particularly if people want to stop mining on Eligius because they were in on the scam (or any other reason). I will clarify that Eligius miners were not adversely impacted by this, and that the CLC mining involved only adding data that I hashed myself to my own transactions; and I was careful to ensure that nobody lost any confirmed CLC. If any Eligius miner wishes to inquire further, I will take the time to answer specific to-the-point questions which are signmessage'd with an active (ie, has mined in the past week) Eligius payout address that has earned at least 2000 TBC (5.36870912 BTC) over all time.

Eligius is a Bitcoin mining pool and I am, as always, committed to doing my best to contribute to and protect the Bitcoin ecosystem. Pyramid schemes built upon forks of the Bitcoin software ultimately discredit and harm Bitcoin's reputation. I hope CoiledCoin will be the last of such scams now that it is clear there are people (not just myself) willing to stand up to them. Namecoin alone demonstrates a legitimate, innovative use of Bitcoin technology, and while I don't personally agree with their ideals/goals, I see it as a good thing for Bitcoin and worth cooperating with.

cablepair, regarding Devcoin, I don't see any reason to treat it as different from any other scamcoin. I will at least discuss it with you on IRC before doing anything other than mining it with the almost-unmodified (zero txn fee, zero post-maturity delay) Devcoin client.

P.S. While the opposition seem to be very venemous and vocal, I have gotten a lot more positive support from a head-count perspective.

I don't particularly have any incentive to respond to the scammers that I foiled, given the significant cost (in time) to do so. Nor do I have any financial loss or care particularly if people want to stop mining on Eligius because they were in on the scam (or any other reason). [...)

Wow, I had a feeling that Eligius sucked, now I know my intuition was tons more right than I could ever expect!

Well ain't that special so have you guys formed the committee yet to decide just what coins are allowed to exists so they don't taint the sainted holy bitcoins...

So? Fight back. Fix your technology. Raise enough BTC to pay two or three small bitcoin pools which are together larger than luke to incentivize them to merge mine this coin. Had this been done— hell— had this been announced in advance of going live, then it wouldn't have been vulnerable to this attack.

Altchains like this are vulnerable because they have no value, especially initially... Merged mining takes effort to set up— contribute to making it cheaper— otherwise only people who are looking to ponzi a new coin or are looking to burn it down have much incentive to join it. A little payment money for mining would go a long way to tiping the incentives towards cooperating rather than defecting against it.

If you're going to be an altchain you should innovate— not just copy bitcoin code. Here is a chance.

I'm laughing at CH's claims— as if SC weren't the most repeatedly exploited coin of them all. That it says around at all speaks to the amazing power of hope. Sadly, things don't seem to change.

I'm doing a full quote of gmaxwell's post to try to preserve it for posterity.

I like it the most where he came up with "tiping the incentives" as an euphemism for extortion.

Luke-Jr has a very stilted writing style. gmaxwell is a world-class copy-writer.

We used to joke about "mining cartel". But now we have "mining mafia" consolidating the control of their territory. Forget about doing a collection for Max Keiser to shoot a short about Bitcoin. We should do a round of fund-raising to induce F.F.Coppola to direct and produce a "Godminer" triptych.

+1

Who is the pool operator of Bitcoin P2Pool?! It have a pool operator?!

I don't particularly have any incentive to respond to the scammers that I foiled, given the significant cost (in time) to do so. Nor do I have any financial loss or care particularly if people want to stop mining on Eligius because they were in on the scam (or any other reason). I will clarify that Eligius miners were not adversely impacted by this, and that the CLC mining involved only adding data that I hashed myself to my own transactions; and I was careful to ensure that nobody lost any confirmed CLC. If any Eligius miner wishes to inquire further, I will take the time to answer specific to-the-point questions which are signmessage'd with an active (ie, has mined in the past week) Eligius payout address that has earned at least 2000 TBC (5.36870912 BTC) over all time.

Eligius is a Bitcoin mining pool and I am, as always, committed to doing my best to contribute to and protect the Bitcoin ecosystem. Pyramid schemes built upon forks of the Bitcoin software ultimately discredit and harm Bitcoin's reputation. I hope CoiledCoin will be the last of such scams now that it is clear there are people (not just myself) willing to stand up to them. Namecoin alone demonstrates a legitimate, innovative use of Bitcoin technology, and while I don't personally agree with their ideals/goals, I see it as a good thing for Bitcoin and worth cooperating with.

cablepair, regarding Devcoin, I don't see any reason to treat it as different from any other scamcoin. I will at least discuss it with you on IRC before doing anything other than mining it with the almost-unmodified (zero txn fee, zero post-maturity delay) Devcoin client.

P.S. While the opposition seem to be very venemous and vocal, I have gotten a lot more positive support from a head-count perspective.

This is better than I could ever imagine: religious freakery mixed with golden calf worship really produces comedy gold.

Godminer-Jr is warning you: if you have a nice little research chain it would be sad to see it unable to process transactions. It has been written on the tablets revealed on Mt.Sinai: Thou shalt have none other chains before mine (Deuteronomy 5:4-21).

Your kind loving actions are duly noted and the ass kissers are out in force small shock there. BTW the same pyramid scheme you talk about can be applied to bitcoin as well, so stones and glass houses...

SAC, you're on my list of cool people, so don't take this as a slam, but I think you're on the wrong side of the argument here. ArtForz did the exact same thing with i0coin when it was released. BitcoinExpress did the exact same thing with SC (or at least BCX was the public face with high likelihood someone else did the actual heavy lifting). And now Luke did it with CLC. The first two examples lead to more secure implementations of the alt-coins and gave us a glimpse of what real-world impact a 51% attack has.

I'm doing a full quote of gmaxwell's post to try to preserve it for posterity.I like it the most where he came up with "tiping the incentives" as an euphemism for extortion.Luke-Jr has a very stilted writing style. gmaxwell is a world-class copy-writer.

Thank you. I've worked for years on my rhetoric so that when the new world order came I could at least find a place for myself as a an author of propaganda for The Authority.

Quote

We used to joke about "mining cartel". But now we have "mining mafia" consolidating the control of their territory. Forget about doing a collection for Max Keiser to shoot a short about Bitcoin. We should do a round of fund-raising to induce F.F.Coppola to direct and produce a "Godminer" triptych.

The challenges here were previously forseen: This is why litecoin uses an alternative POW, merged mining is the opposite extreme: You don't even have to stop mining bitcoin to mine a merged coin. Part of the argument for bitcoin's security, since day one, has been that it's more profitable to cooperate than it is to defect. At the introduction point of competitive bitcoin clone which is merged-mined the opposite is true. This is a class of error that the altchains make over and over again: Starting up another copy of bitcoin without really understanding the first ones.

But to be clear, I'm not talking about paying people not to attack. I'm talking about paying them to be positive instead of indifferent. Paying them to take the currently non-trivial cost of setting up another merged mining chain and mining it with default rules. There is no reason to mine the obscure currency altchains except for the hope of getting in on a ponzi scheme, or a fringe hope that they eventually mature to compete with bitcoin— and for people who care about Bitcoin's value and credibility those are the last things we want. If you offed people some bitcoin, that might easily overcome these reservations (after all, chances are no one will hear about any of these alt-cryptocurrencies) and help out providing the startup security that you need.

The problem of indifference making new merged chains trivial to attack exists even without any pool centralization. If you subtract the big pools from the hash rate that CLC reached, what would it take to 50% it? 10GH? How many CLC advocates are solo bitcoin miners with a merged mining setup that could compete with that?

I'm doing a full quote of gmaxwell's post to try to preserve it for posterity.I like it the most where he came up with "tiping the incentives" as an euphemism for extortion.Luke-Jr has a very stilted writing style. gmaxwell is a world-class copy-writer.

Thank you. I've worked for years on my rhetoric so that when the new world order came I could at least find a place for myself as a an author of propaganda for The Authority.

Quote

We used to joke about "mining cartel". But now we have "mining mafia" consolidating the control of their territory. Forget about doing a collection for Max Keiser to shoot a short about Bitcoin. We should do a round of fund-raising to induce F.F.Coppola to direct and produce a "Godminer" triptych.

The challenges here were previously forseen: This is why litecoin uses an alternative POW, merged mining is the opposite extreme: You don't even have to stop mining bitcoin to mine a merged coin. Part of the argument for bitcoin's security, since day one, has been that it's more profitable to cooperate than it is to defect. At the introduction point of competitive bitcoin clone which is merged-mined the opposite is true. This is a class of error that the altchains make over and over again: Starting up another copy of bitcoin without really understanding the first ones.

But to be clear, I'm not talking about paying people not to attack. I'm talking about paying them to be positive instead of indifferent. Paying them to take the currently non-trivial cost of setting up another merged mining chain and mining it with default rules. There is no reason to mine the obscure currency altchains except for the hope of getting in on a ponzi scheme, or a fringe hope that they eventually mature to compete with bitcoin— and for people who care about Bitcoin's value and credibility those are the last things we want. If you offed people some bitcoin, that might easily overcome these reservations (after all, chances are no one will hear about any of these alt-cryptocurrencies) and help out providing the startup security that you need.

The problem of indifference making new merged chains trivial to attack exists even without any pool centralization. If you subtract the big pools from the hash rate that CLC reached, what would it take to 50% it? 10GH? How many CLC advocates are solo bitcoin miners with a merged mining setup that could compete with that?

1) Some Bitcoin luminaries (like Gavin, casascius, Death&Taxes) have already begun thinking about other ways of defending the block-chain besides the brute force. Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55394.msg660862#msg660862 and the following discussion. I just observe that conflict of interest (by being materially involved in mining) seems to be the biggest obstacle to understanding them.

2) Bitcoin can be viewed as a way to collect banking fees without incurring the fiduciary obligations. The concept of fiduciary duty is older than banking and as old as human societies. In majority of cases fiduciary duty has a positive value and lowers the cost of transactions in a society. In some narrow cases fiduciary duty has a large negative value and increases the cost of transactions: bank is fiducially obliged to prevent payment for contraband or financial support for Wikileaks. As it stands right now Bitcoin solves the problem of negative externalities only for relatively narrow class of users: smugglers, money launderers, etc. By reintroducing the concept of fiduciary obligation to the protocol the majority of users (for whom the externalities are positive) the overall cost of securing the network will be lower.

Your kind loving actions are duly noted and the ass kissers are out in force small shock there. BTW the same pyramid scheme you talk about can be applied to bitcoin as well, so stones and glass houses...

SAC, you're on my list of cool people, so don't take this as a slam, but I think you're on the wrong side of the argument here. ArtForz did the exact same thing with i0coin when it was released. BitcoinExpress did the exact same thing with SC (or at least BCX was the public face with high likelihood someone else did the actual heavy lifting). And now Luke did it with CLC. The first two examples lead to more secure implementations of the alt-coins and gave us a glimpse of what real-world impact a 51% attack has.

The sweet isn't as sweet without the sour.

I think you miss the whole point, all the other attacks were done by users with their own personal(or rented) resources while luke-joker used the resources of his pool which doesnt belong to him unless he asked every user mining there if they consent to what he is doing.

Luke-Joker never did any of that except whip out his catwomen spandex and snapped his fluffy whip.

...In the land of the stale, the man with one share is king... >> Clipse